Teen Summer Challenge

Just wanted to share a very cool site we just launched called Teen Summer Challenge which was built on a backbone of Paul’s Achievements plugin. Many thanks @djpaul , and I’m eagerly anticipating the next major release of Achievements!

I’m back a second time to say how awesome that site looks like. So exciting! I would love love to get any feedback from you or your team regarding how well Achievements did or didn’t work for you — either here or paul@byotos.com.

As you seem to know, I’m working on a big new version of Achievements at the moment, and seeing what you’ve done with it and BuddyPress are hugely inspiring and motivating to me. Thank you.

As you may or may not have guessed, I work at a public library in Washington State as a Librarian, and among my duties are finding creative and compelling ways to engage our customers online. I’ve long been a WordPress fan, and discovered Buddypress and Achievements this last fall. We decided to pilot both with our Teen Summer Challenge, an annual library program directed towards teens, but we’re very interested in how we could integrate both into the next version of our main website, for all audiences.

I love open source, absolutely love WordPress, and am just so impressed with the work you guys have done with Buddypress and Achievements specifically. My profession is all about community building, and Buddypress gives me a platform to make that happen online, while Achievements give me a very practical system by which to motivate or incentivize behavior in the community.

So far everything with the Teen Summer Challenge is going fantastic, but amongst the many feature requests and suggestions I could make, I do have a top 3:

1. Claim Code badge redemption. Enter a pre-defined code and earn the corresponding badge. So many possibilities with a functionality like this.

@carotidscom : The badge claims are handled through Contact Form 7. Basically just sends a claim to a designated staff person via email to verify activities and then award. Manageable at a couple of hundred users, but we just hit 300 teen participants and we’re growing, so a more self-regulated claiming system would be ideal, as its a significant investment of staff time. Thus the above request for pre-generated claim codes or page visits, which would allow us to change the game a bit to accommodate more automation.

@neononcon I’ve taken no extra steps so far in terms of spam, as its yet to present itself as a problem, but obviously size and exposure can put the site on the radar. From my experience though, extra registration options via xprofile seem to discourage spammers.

Hi pmcvicker. I couldn’t find out an email address for you, so I hope you see this. I’m re-launching my achievementsapp.com website for the achievements plugin, and I would like to get some words or thoughts from you about your experience why you are using the plugin, how you are using the plugin, and how well it’s been working out for you so far — kind of a case study, but much more informal, so I can write up a blog post. I’m paul@byotos.com if you’re interested. Thanks.